version-spec.txt 2.1 KB

12345678910111213141516171819202122232425262728293031323334353637383940414243444546474849
  1. $Id$
  2. HOW TOR VERSION NUMBERS WORK
  3. ============================
  4. The Old Way
  5. -----------
  6. Before 0.1.0, versions were of the format:
  7. MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO(status(PATCHLEVEL))?(-cvs)?
  8. where MAJOR, MINOR, MICRO, and PATCHLEVEL are numbers, status is one
  9. of "pre" (for an alpha release), "rc" (for a release candidate), or
  10. "." for a release. As a special case, "a.b.c" was equivalent to
  11. "a.b.c.0". We compare the elements in order (major, minor, micro,
  12. status, patchlevel, cvs), with "cvs" preceding non-cvs.
  13. We would start each development branch with a final version in mind:
  14. say, "0.0.8". Our first pre-release would be "0.0.8pre1", followed by
  15. (for example) "0.0.8pre2-cvs", "0.0.8pre2", "0.0.8pre3-cvs",
  16. "0.0.8rc1", "0.0.8rc2-cvs", and "0.0.8rc2". Finally, we'd release
  17. 0.0.8. The stable CVS branch would then be versioned "0.0.8.1-cvs",
  18. and any eventual bugfix release would be "0.0.8.1".
  19. The New Way
  20. -----------
  21. After 0.1.0, versions are of the format:
  22. MAJOR.MINOR.MICRO(.PATCHLEVEL)(-status_tag)
  23. The stuff in parenthesis is optional. As before, MAJOR, MINOR, MICRO,
  24. and PATCHLEVEL are numbers, with an absent number equivalent to 0.
  25. All versions should be distinguishable purely by those four
  26. numbers. The status tag is purely informational, and lets you know how
  27. stable we think the release is: "alpha" is pretty unstable; "rc" is a
  28. release candidate; and no tag at all means that we have a final
  29. release. If the tag ends with "-cvs" or "-dev", you're looking at a
  30. development snapshot that came after a given release. If we *do*
  31. encounter two versions that differ only by status tag, we compare them
  32. lexically.
  33. Now, we start each development branch with (say) 0.1.1.1-alpha. The
  34. patchlevel increments consistently as the status tag changes, for
  35. example, as in: 0.1.1.2-alpha, 0.1.1.3-alpha, 0.1.1.4-rc 0.1.1.5-rc,
  36. Eventually, we release 0.1.1.6. The next patch release is 0.1.1.7.
  37. Between these releases, CVS is versioned with a -cvs tag: after
  38. 0.1.1.1-alpha comes 0.1.1.1-alpha-cvs, and so on. But starting with
  39. 0.1.2.1-alpha-dev, we switched to SVN and started using the "-dev"
  40. suffix instead of the "-cvs" suffix.